from the not-thinking-it-through dept

Update: Or not. Turns out this was an April Fool's joke that Glyn missed. So, congrats, Crikey, on fooling our most careful writer...

Now that the completely disproportionate data retention law has been rushed through the Australian Parliament, politicians are suddenly realizing that their metadata will be collected too. And so, as was perhaps inevitable, they have asked for an exemption, as reported here by Crikey:

An in-camera meeting of the high-powered Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security last week agreed to task the Department of Defence's signals intelligence arm, the Australian Signals Directorate, and the new Australian Cyber Security Centre with ensuring politicians' metadata is not captured by the government's new data retention regime while they are at work in [the Australian capital] Canberra.

The argument was that:

given Parliament House is supposed to be the centre of Australian democracy, they shouldn't be, you know, tracked while at work there

Well, many people would argue that they shouldn't be tracked either, but obviously politicians are special. It seems that there were two options for achieving this carve-out. One required officials personally identifying and deleting the metadata of politicians, staffers and senior public servants -- a manual process aptly dubbed "handwashing". The other, cheaper, approach -- the one chosen -- was simply to remove metadata from all communications generated within Australia's Parliament House.

Problem solved -- except that some 680,000 visitors enter the building annually, and while they are there, their metadata will not be collected either. Ironically, then, the new exemption for politicians from a scheme allegedly to help the fight against terrorism and crime will turn Parliament House into the perfect location for plotting precisely those things in relative safety.

from the dumb-dumbs dept

Hey, politicians who read Techdirt... look, can we talk for a moment? As someone with a keen interest in DC machinations and politics on a national level, I feel like I know you guys well enough to have a heart to heart with you. And I get how the DC game is played. Some story comes out creating a national outrage with some percentage of the country and the whole thing seems designed to thieve the attention you might otherwise be getting from the press and the constituency. It's not only tempting, it's downright irresistible to react to such a story in an insane way, even if only to momentarily draw attention, any kind of attention, back on yourselves. I get it, believe me. When I first saw the trailer for the new Game of Thrones while sitting in my living room with my family, for instance, I immediately stood up, took my pants off, and ran around the block a few times until my wife clotheslined me on the third lap. Because, let's face it, that's how we roll, am I right?

But, guys, seriously...there's enough meat on the bone in the Hillary Clinton super-secret unofficial email fiasco-steak to work with. You really don't have to lose your minds and draw all the wrong kind of attention to yourselves as a result. For example, don't be Lindsey Graham.

If you click that link, there's a video of Senator Lindsey Graham (we'd embed it here, but NBC still hasn't figured out how to allow HTTPS embeds, because it doesn't care about your privacy, apparently). Here's the key part of Graham's exchange on Meet the Press.

Chuck Todd asked Graham, "Do you have a private e-mail address?"

Graham's answer: "I don't email. No, you can have every email I've ever sent. I've never sent one. I don't know what that makes me."

Well, Senator, it quite likely makes you the most unqualified member of the subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law for starters. Because email is ubiquitous enough at this point that I'm not even sure it should be called "technology" without being prefaced by the qualifier "super old and probably due for displacement." To at once sit on that committee and proudly state that you've never sent an email during your time in office sounds like you're begging to be replaced on that committee.

But my point is a larger one: the Clinton email scandal is one that should not result in any thinking person believing that having never sent an email to anyone ever is a bragging point. Put this kind of reaction into other contexts and see how far it gets you. One wouldn't, for instance, react to the cluster-bomb that has become Obamacare by proudly stating, "I've never even gone to a doctor!" One wouldn't criticize our foreign policy in the Middle East by proudly shouting, "Dude, I've never even been out of our country!" That's just stupid.

And so is proudly claiming that you've never sent an email. You want to have some kind of massive reaction to get attention? Fine, just don't say stupid things like Lindsey Graham. My suggestion? Take your pants off and go for a jog. You'll feel better when you do, I promise.

from the who-are-they-representing dept

Within hours of President Obama's surprise call for true net neutrality rules under Title II, Republicans in Congress were in a full-fledged freakout. Beyond the nutty comparisons to Obamacare or suggesting that this will lead to greater oppression in Russia, China and Iran (no, really, that claim was made), a bunch of elected Republicans in Congress sent a letter to the FCC strongly opposing Title II, insisting that it would be "beyond the scope of the FCC's authority."

For years now, we've pointed out how ridiculous it is that net neutrality became a "partisan" issue. In the early days, when it was neither, there were interesting discussions about the pros and cons of it. Once it became a "blue team v. red team" issue, most reasoned debate went out the window, and we were left with ridiculous exaggerations about "regulating the internet" or "the death of the internet." That's not helpful.

But here's the thing: actual Republicans outside of Congress support net neutrality too (though, it helps not to call it "net neutrality.") Two separate studies have come out this week making this point. First up, there was a poll from the University of Delaware's Center for Political Communication, checking in with 900 adult US residents. When not using the term net neutrality, but asking if they "favor" or "oppose" allowing broadband access providers to charge websites or streaming video services extra for faster speeds -- across the board, only 17% favored or strongly favored that idea, while 81% were opposed (37%) or strongly opposed (44%) the idea. Digging down to just the Republicans, it turns out that even more Republicans were against this than democrats. Only 13% favored (11%) or strongly favored (2%) letting broadband players set up such tollbooths, while 85% were opposed (44%) or strongly opposed (41%).

Meanwhile, a different poll released by the Internet Freedom Business Alliance (IFBA) and done by Vox Populi, surveying 1270 active voters, found similarly overwhelming results that conservatives and Republicans actually support (strongly) net neutrality:

Some 83% of voters who self-identified as “very conservative” were concerned about the possibility of ISPs having the power to “influence content” online. Only 17% reported being unconcerned. Similarly, 83% of self-identified conservatives thought that Congress should take action to ensure that cable companies do not “monopolize the Internet” or “reduce the inherent equality of the Internet” by charging some content companies for speedier access.

A few months ago, we wrote about a great argument made by a "self-identified conservative" arguing why Republicans should support reclassification, mainly to block out the harmful monopolistic tendencies of broadband providers. And it appears that conservatives and Republicans (and, of course, those aren't always the same thing, but there is a lot of overlap) intuitively agree with this position.

So why don't their elected representatives? The explanation that still seems to make the most sense is that the money is too good in opposing net neutrality.

Faisal Gill, a longtime Republican Party operative and one-time candidate for public office who held a top-secret security clearance and served in the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush;

Asim Ghafoor, a prominent attorney who has represented clients in terrorism-related cases;

Hooshang Amirahmadi, an Iranian-American professor of international relations at Rutgers University;

Agha Saeed, a former political science professor at California State University who champions Muslim civil liberties and Palestinian rights;

Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the country.

This certainly harkens back to the days of spying on Martin Luther King and other human rights activists -- the kind of thing that was supposed to have stopped decades ago. In fact, the driving reason for setting up the FISA Court was to prevent this kind of thing. As Greenwald's report notes, these individuals were on a list of folks who the DOJ had convinced the FISA Court that there was "probable cause" were engaged in terrorism.

The individuals appear on an NSA spreadsheet in the Snowden archives called “FISA recap”—short for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under that law, the Justice Department must convince a judge with the top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that there is probable cause to believe that American targets are not only agents of an international terrorist organization or other foreign power, but also “are or may be” engaged in or abetting espionage, sabotage, or terrorism. The authorizations must be renewed by the court, usually every 90 days for U.S. citizens.

The spreadsheet shows 7,485 email addresses listed as monitored between 2002 and 2008. Many of the email addresses on the list appear to belong to foreigners whom the government believes are linked to Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah. Among the Americans on the list are individuals long accused of terrorist activity, including Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, who were killed in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen.

But a three-month investigation by The Intercept—including interviews with more than a dozen current and former federal law enforcement officials involved in the FISA process—reveals that in practice, the system for authorizing NSA surveillance affords the government wide latitude in spying on U.S. citizens.

Reading through the report, it becomes quite clear that the main reason these individuals on the list is solely because they're Muslim. Of every lawyer who has helped represent defendants in terrorism-related cases, the only one on this list just happens to be Muslim. As the article reminds us, a few years back, Spencer Ackerman did some great reporting, revealing how the FBI was being trained to believe all Muslims were "violent" and "radical" and the impact of that ridiculous training appears to be clear in what this latest report finds. Perhaps the most chilling example of this anti-Muslim attitude is found in a training document revealed in this new report, showing intelligence community members how to "identify" targets for the FISA court. The "placeholder" name says it all:

Later in the report, the government tries to deny that there was a FISA Court order concerning at least one of the individuals listed above, even though they were in the spreadsheet. But that level of confusion only suggests that the process is even more of a mess. Whether or not this complied with the law is a distraction. The law shouldn't allow this kind of thing.

A former Justice Department official involved in FISA policy in the Obama Administration says the process contains too many internal checks and balances to serve as a rubber stamp on surveillance of Americans. But the former official, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about FISA matters, acknowledges that there are significant problems with the process. Having no one present in court to contest the secret allegations can be an invitation to overreach. “There are serious weaknesses,” the former official says. “The lack of transparency and adversarial process—that’s a problem.”

Indeed, the government’s ability to monitor such high-profile Muslim-Americans—with or without warrants—suggests that the most alarming and invasive aspects of the NSA’s surveillance occur not because the agency breaks the law, but because it is able to exploit the law’s permissive contours. “The scandal is what Congress has made legal,” says Jameel Jaffer, an ACLU deputy legal director. “The claim that the intelligence agencies are complying with the laws is just a distraction from more urgent questions relating to the breadth of the laws themselves.”

Much of the rest of the story involves a detailed look at the men listed above, all of which is worth reading, demonstrating just how ridiculous it was to be spying on their communications. The video of Faisal Gill is really worth watching:

from the nobody-to-defend dept

While we've talked in the past about whether or not a blog or publication should out a previously anonymous commenter if the outting would be newsworthy, it's worth noting that there was no real consensus reached amongst the venerated Techdirt community. Some of us think that there might be room for such a move. Others, such as myself, take more of a hard line approach to protecting anonymity (see the comments section in the link above for what I'd say is a really nice discussion on the question). Either way, with the widespread blogosphere and public participation in online communities only ratcheting ever-higher, it's useful to bring stories to the table to discuss how this all works when such events do occur.

This latest example is about John Huppenthal, Arizona's Superintendent of Public Instruction and apparent frequent anonymous commenter at Blog For Arizona. Bob Lord, of BFA, recently penned a post that outs Huppenthal for his previously anonymous and simultaneously insane comments on the site.

Okay, for the few of you who have not figured this out yet, by all indication our friend Thucky is John Huppenthal, the Superintendent of Public Instruction, which is the fifth highest elected office in the state. This may be a first. I don't know of any other elected official who has led a double life as a serial blog troll besides John Huppenthal. Chalk that up to Arizona having the market cornered on political craziness, I guess.

The post then outs Huppenthal for commenting anonymously there, on other conservative sites, and for creating duplicate handles all over the place in order to fake some kind of consensus around what he says. And what he was saying, analysis indicates, is batshit crazy. Such as:

-"bat shit crazy stuff"!!! Its in Obamas book, Obama said he was born in Kenya!!!! If this were a Republican, you would be going nuts demanding those college records.

-Hitler worked to eliminate the Jews. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood was given the job of eliminating African Americans. Hitler fed 6 million Jews into the ovens. Sanger has fed 16 million African Americans into the abortion mills.

-No spanish radio stations, no spanish billboards, no spanish tv, no spanish newspapers. This is America, speak English.

Now, it's worth noting that Huppenthal has since acknowledged that he did indeed make those comments under several different names, speaking of and to himself in the third person. That acknowledgement was followed up with something about believing in public discourse, regretting certain inflammatory words (Hitler! Kenya!), but hoping that we should all recognize that our great country has a long history of anonymous speech from politicians.

And...I happen to think he's right on that last point. Look, Huppenthal is a blowhard, fact-ignoring caricature of a politician on one end of the political spectrum. He's not representative of anything other than his own idiocy, but the sites he went to offered anonymous commenting and then pulled the rug out from under him when they decided that his commenting was a story. They're not wrong; Huppenthal's online antics and self-sock-puppetry is indeed a story, but does that story outweigh the fallout from the removal of anonymity? I would say no. Others, including other writers here at Techdirt, might say yes. I'm more interested in what you all think, anonymous or otherwise.

Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler regularly ordered state troopers assigned to drive him to turn on the lights and sirens on the way to routine appointments, directing them to speed, run red lights and bypass traffic jams by using the shoulder, according to written accounts by the Maryland State Police.

When troopers refused to activate the emergency equipment, Gansler, now a Democratic candidate for governor, often flipped the switches himself, according to the police accounts. And on occasion, he became so impatient that he insisted on driving, directing the trooper to the passenger’s seat. Gansler once ran four red lights with sirens blaring, a trooper wrote. Another account said he “brags” about driving the vehicle unaccompanied on weekends with the sirens on.

“This extremely irresponsible behavior is non-stop and occurs on a daily basis,” Lt. Charles Ardolini, commander of the state police executive protection section, wrote in a December 2011 memo that said the problem had existed for five years. “Attorney General Gansler has consistently acted in a way that disregards public safety, our Troopers safety and even the law.”

Has he ever. For more than five years, Gansler has been playing Mr. Right-of-Way, either by cruising around in law enforcement vehicles unaccompanied or by being the annoying backseat driver who reaches up front to flip on the lights and sirens anytime traffic slows or a light turns red.

There are 20 pages of AG misbehavior, which would be highly entertaining if it wasn't for the fact that this man is an arbiter of justice, the man who's supposed to be holding cops accountable, not the other way around.

According to statements from officers who've had the displeasure of working with Gansler, he feels everything should be treated as an emergency.

Everyday AG insists that the Troopers run Code 1 to his events. This includes breakfast, meetings and his children's sporting events. If the Troopers tell him that they have been ordered by their Lieutenant not to do this, he will make negative comments about me and "order" them to put the emergency equipment on. If they do not turn the lights and sirens on he will reach over and turn them on himself. I am told almost daily by the Troopers that they are worried about their safety and the safety of others.

Nice. An AG that puts the safety of others behind "breakfast" on the priority list. He also likes to use trooper vehicles as personal vehicles and drive the [[wheels]] bumper off them.

Driving the vehicle himself: On several occasions the Troopers have responded to his house for a pick up and the truck has had damage. Sometimes minor and a few times more severe. (we had to tape the front bumper on once) He freely discusses with the Troopers about how he drives the truck on the weekends and evenings. He also freely discusses driving the vehicle with the lights and sirens on without the Troopers present. Most of the Troopers feel that this is illegal and this makes them very uncomfortable.

Throughout the report, Gansler is quoted as telling troopers such things as, "stop signs are optional," "troopers don't sit in traffic" and "I don't care how fast we drive. The faster the better." He also has pointed out to a few troopers that he'd rather do the driving himself whenever they seem hesitant to indulge his desire to break traffic laws. One incident saw him order the trooper to engage the lights and drive on the right shoulder in order to bypass traffic stopped by an accident. His driver did so, passing other unmarked vehicles, including one holding the governor. When the trooper mentioned to Gansler that he might face disciplinary action for driving on the shoulder when there was no emergency, Gansler said, "Oh, OK," and left looking "completely unconcerned."

Gansler also threatened to report troopers that didn't drive "correctly," i.e. run red lights, activate sirens/lights, and exceed the speed limit. He also trashed the two citations he was given, stating he wouldn't pay them.

Gansler blames this on "long-running animosity" between the AG and Lt. Charles Ardolini, the head of the state's executive protection division.

“The picture being painted by these documents is not an accurate reflection of reality,” said Gansler, a former Montgomery County state’s attorney who was first elected attorney general in 2006. “I deeply respect the troopers and job they do protecting me and the public. A few of the 18 troopers who have provided me protection felt my backseat driving made them uncomfortable — for that I apologize.”

Gansler's spokesperson claims this started in 2011, when Gansler felt he was being handed off "second-tier troopers" by Ardolini. Ardolini claims it goes back to 2008 when Gansler was apparently irritated that the governor had troops assigned to him while Gansler did not. (A spokesman for the Maryland State Police chimed in with a statement that there's no such thing as "second-tier troopers," a win for trooper morale if nothing else.)

Whether this report provides the entire picture of Gansler's behavior is somewhat open to debate. But all Gansler has really offered in defense is "someone's out to get me" and the not-on-the-record statements of two troopers (out of the 18 assigned to Gansler so far) that portray the AG as a pleasure to work with and a stickler for obeying the law.

The document release couldn't have come at a worse time for Gansler, seeing as it came right as Gansler announced his running mate for his run for governor. The current governor has already endorsed Gansler's opponent and has instructed the state police to take whatever action they feel is appropriate, including revoking the AG's access to the protective duty. The timing may be suspect, but it's highly unlikely Ardolini would be working towards cutting off service to a person a majority of troopers liked working with. Rather, it looks as though more than five years of abuse has caught up with Gansler, and Ardolini's no longer interested in having his troopers serve as enablers for a wanna-be cop who seemingly breaks rules just to break rules.

from the wait,-what? dept

By now, I think everyone agrees that politicians lie. Sometimes they lie about spying on us as we take selfies with our camera phone, sometimes they lie in court, and it seems like sometimes they lie just for the fun of it. Many people talk about how awful it is that politicians lie. They think that politicians need to lie less. I disagree. I think that our best hope is to elect politicians so completely full of shit that their BS is instantly recognizable as such, which means we actually know the opposite is the truth. It's sort of a governance by photographic negative philosophy.

But what would such a politician look like, you ask? Well, probably a great deal like Malaysia's Reezal Merican ('Merican!) Bin Naina Merican (totally 'Merican!). See, Reezal doesn't like video games all that much, primarily because he thinks they are anti-Islam, and he's currently advocating banning Grand Theft Auto 5 (of course). Fortunately for him, he has some international partners in this ban. Namely the UK and his namesake, 'Merica.

In Malaysia, a member of Parliament named Reezal Merican Bin Naina Merican is asking his government to ban Grand Theft Auto V due to violence. His rationale is that the United States and the United Kingdom have already banned the game. They have? Oh really?

Confused? Me too, because just last night I was happily playing GTA5 while coincidentally shouting "'Merica!" with each and every gunshot fired from my avatar. I thought perhaps I was playing a banned game, which actually only made me revel in its glory all the more, but then I remembered that Reezal is a politician. One, I might add, who seems to be putting my super-liar government philosophy into practice.

Because, of course, GTA5 certainly isn't banned in the UK or 'Merica, something which I'd guess Reezal knows full well. But if you're going to lie, I say go big. At worst you'll get called out on it, but at best we all get to have a laugh and at least one politician becomes infinitely more transparent through the power of bullshit.

from the as-do-our-reps-in-the-other-Washington dept

If you're speeding to make up time because you're late for work and get pulled over, chances are telling the officer, "I'm late for work," isn't going to get you much more than a condescending, "And now you're even later," along with a citation. "Late for work" still isn't an acceptable excuse for breaking the law. Unless you're a Washington State legislator.

Washington state legislators headed to work can't get speeding tickets -- or so says the Washington State Patrol and at least one local police department.

A spokesman for WSP says Washington lawmakers are constitutionally protected from receiving noncriminal traffic tickets during a legislative session, as well as 15 days before. A spokeswoman says The Tacoma Police Department abides by a similar policy.

State Patrol spokesman Bob Calkins says the privilege not only applies to moving violations near the state Capitol in Olympia, but potentially anywhere in the state.

But why would you be late for work? The state legislature only meets twice a year (although each session can last as long as 5 months) and you've got 15 days to get there. I suppose the day-to-day grind of an extended session might result in a few snooze-button-heavy mornings of leadfooting it to the capitol building, but for the most part, legislators shouldn't really rub up against this constitutional protection too often.

Here's the section that gives legislators the right to put constitutionally-empowered pedals to the metal.

SECTION 16 PRIVILEGES FROM ARREST. Members of the legislature shall be privileged from arrest in all cases except treason, felony and breach of the peace; they shall not be subject to any civil process during the session of the legislature, nor for fifteen days next before the commencement of each session.

It's not just speeding tickets legislators that can avoided, if this wording is accurate. There's all sorts of criminal acts that don't reach the "felony" level, all of which could conceivably be performed without consequence during legislative sessions (and 15 days prior). If viewed this way, speeding tickets (or lack thereof) are just scratching the surface.

Hugh Spitzer, a Seattle lawyer who teaches state constitutional law at the University of Washington, said although protecting legislators from traffic tickets seems “pretty weird,” there’s a historical reason for the constitution’s privilege from arrest provisions.

The Stewart kings in 17th-century England were known for arresting political opponents and keeping them from reaching Parliament to vote, Spitzer said. The authors of the Declaration of Independence had similar complaints about King George III interfering with their regular legislative meetings, he said.

“It’s very old and there’s a good reason in the first place, but sometimes those reasons go away,” said Spitzer, who co-wrote “The Washington State Constitution: A Reference Guide.”

The Senators and Representatives shall receive a Compensation for their Services, to be ascertained by Law, and paid out of the Treasury of the United States. They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.

Even though the rationale behind this section no longers exists, the law remains on the books and can be construed by wily lawmakers as a free pass for speeding. And even though the threat of an interfering king is long gone, it's not hard to imagine a crooked politician abusing his or her power to have opponents detained by a "friends" in the law enforcement community. This may be just as uncommon as the threat it was originally written to address, but it doesn't hurt to have some sort of protection built in to ensure legislators are free to go about the business of legislating unhassled by The Man.

On the other hand, the outdated rationale does lend itself to abuse. The fact that the legislature only meets twice a year will greatly limit the abuse and there doesn't seem to be any evidence that Washington politicians are routinely exceeding the posted speed limits. Certainly this is a better solution than issuing legislators special license plates that are essentially "ticket-proof" 365 days a year, as they don't exist in the DMV database. (Although if you're interested in special plates, Washington will issue you a "square dancer license plate" for an additional fee. [Picture here.]) But still, it's always a little disheartening to hear that lawmakers are immune from the same laws they've crafted, even if only on a part-time basis.

from the not-everyone-is-trustworthy dept

I'd been meaning to write up a post like this for a few weeks, and when Pro Publica wrote about why it was publishing details of the latest Ed Snowden leaks concerning the feds ability to break encryption, they highlighted the exact point I was thinking about in talking about the nature of an untrustworthy government:

American history is replete with examples of the dangers of unchecked power operating in secret. Richard Nixon, for instance, was twice elected president of this country. He tried to subvert law enforcement, intelligence and other agencies for political purposes, and was more than willing to violate laws in the process. Such a person could come to power again. We need a system that can withstand such challenges. That system requires public knowledge of the power the government possesses.

To date, nearly every single defense of the NSA's pervasive surveillance powers, whether it comes from President Obama, James Clapper, Keith Alexander, Dianne Feinstein or Mike Rogers all seems premised on denying this basic fact. They're all focused on how hard the people working on these programs work to stay within the law and how they're designed with the best intentions in mind. In fact, the defenses seem almost entirely premised on this point: "we're the good guys, so you can trust us not to do the wrong thing here."

There's something about historical evil that makes people think that it won't happen again. I know it's a mental bias that I have all the time. We hear stories of the atrocities of Adolf Hitler, the excessive attacks of Joseph McCarthy, the pervasive surveillance of J. Edgar Hoover, and the paranoid political opportunism of Richard Nixon and we have a natural tendency and bias to think "wow, those guys were bad, but that was then -- isn't it great that we live in a time after those guys are gone?" The things that some of those people did were considered so bad, we have a hard time believing that it could happen again. After all we "learned our lesson" and we're in a new era.

But, of course, that's wrong. It's silly and naive.

These things didn't happen long ago at all.

People do bad things. And they will continue to do bad things. That doesn't mean that people are necessarily evil -- most are not. In fact, many who end up doing bad things start out with the best of intentions (and maybe believe to the end that they were following through on those intentions). But, temptation and power are strong drivers of behavior. And eventually abuse and excess are bound to happen.

Even if we assume that everyone working on these programs today is a wonderful soul with the best of intentions (a proposition that is unlikely, but let's go with it), there is simply no way that this will always be the case. This is what is leading to the miscommunication between defenders of these programs and those who fear them. Not all of us automatically assume that those in charge have nefarious intent (and, yes, I know some readers here do assume that), but we recognize that sooner or later, those with nefarious intent will have access and will abuse it. That's just the nature of the beast.

So, when President Obama, James Clapper, Keith Alexander, Dianne Feinstein or Mike Rogers argue "trust us," with these programs, that's really not the point. Even if we trust them, we have no way of knowing if we can or should trust the next guy or the guy after that. The only way -- the only way -- to make sure such programs won't be abused is to build programs that have real public and open oversight. And that's what the defenders of these programs continue to fight back against. And that's the problem.

There's no reason for Google to be doing this other than as a response to the UK government's consensus that Google = Internet, and is therefore responsible for policing everything it crawls. Unfortunately, many offending images will remain beyond the reach of Google. Additionally, turning a hunt for child porn into an algorithmic search will lead to false positives and deletions, as anyone familiar with ContentID and YouTube can readily attest.

The politicians crusading for a child porn-free internet will be satiated. Google's new offensive plays to their strengths, namely:

1. Proclaiming something must be done. 2. Allowing someone else to do that "something."

Child porn, however, remains the true enemy, especially in Britain, where its profile is heightened due to recent events. In the oft-echoed call for someone (namely, Google) to do something about child porn, a rather startling statistic was quoted. According to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF -- an industry-funded group that compiles lists of keywords and illegal abuse sites for subsequent banning by Google, et al), "more than 1.5 million internet users in the UK mistakenly viewed child abuse images last year." (Only 40,000 were reported to the IWF, a point which is left open to speculation.)

It's a rather alarming number. But is it accurate? UK website Ministry of Truth went digging into the math behind this "statistic." The "1.5 million" quote above was pulled from an IWF press release that offered no citations. Perusing the IWF's site itself, MoT found another press release that applied a bit of hedging to the claim.

New study reveals child sexual abuse content as top online concern and potentially 1.5m adults have stumbled upon it.

Note that one word that changes everything.

Hang on a second, we’ve just gone from “1.5 million adults have stumbled across” child porn to “potentially 1.5 million adults have stumbled upon it”, which rather starts to suggest that the IWF’s “study” might not be quite what they’re making it out to be and, sure enough, a little further down the page we hit paydirt:

The ComRes poll conducted among a representative sample of 2058 British adults for the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) shows the vast majority of people in Britain think that child sexual abuse content (“child pornography”) (91%) and computer generated images or cartoons of child sexual abuse (85%) should be removed from the internet.

Riiiiight… so it’s not actually a study, it’s an opinion poll; a grade of evidence that generally sits just above the story you heard from a bloke down the pub who swears blind that his cousin’s boyfriend knows a bloke who knows the bloke that it actually happened to.

Long story short (although the long story is a very interesting read), the poll used skewed demographics (weighted heavily towards the 55-and-older set) to produce this meaningless percentage:

"- 3% have seen/encountered 'Child pornography'"

According to the 2011 Census the adult population of Great Britain is just over 48.1 million and 3% of that is a little under 1.43 million people, which the IWF has rounded up to 1.5 million (ignoring the usual rules on rounding) for its press releases.

The problem with accepting this at face value (and then attaching it to multiple press releases) are numerous. For starters, as many as 1 in 7 UK citizens have never used a computer, much less have internet access. For another, one person's "child porn" is another person's "adult film starring consenting, paid adults." One needs look no further than the Daily Mail's disastrous attempt to show how easy it was to find child porn simply by using the same search terms as those found on a convicted child killer's internet history.

The Mail's Amanda Platell claimed to have taken a journey to the "hell known as internet child porn." Unfortunately, her only souvenir from the trip was a misidentified clip from a 13-year-old (adult) porn film. True, the content of the film would be repulsive to many (simulated sexual assault), but the film was made and distributed legally.

In total, the IWF found 9,550 web pages that hosted child sexual abuse content spread across 1,561 internet domains in 38 different countries. 60% of the child sexual abuse content identified by the IWF was found on ‘one click hosting website’, i.e. a file hosting service/cyberlocker which, for reasons known only to itself, the IWF insists on referring to as a ‘web locker’ despite the fact that no else else seems to use that particular phrase.

A brief glance at that total should readily tell you the percentage is insignificant. And this is a number compiled by a group tasked with hunting down child pornography, an entity that would have a much higher hit rate than the average person browsing the web. Here's how it stacks up to the whole of the internet.

Out of an estimated 14,8 billion indexed web pages, the British public reported just 9,696 web pages (0.000065%) containing child pornography to the IWF in the whole of 2012.

In that same year, just 1561 internet domains (0.001%) were reported to the IWF that were found to contain child pornography out of a minimum of 145.5 million registered domains (and that’s just for five gTLDs and one country specific domain).

In fact, on a single ordinary day in May 2013, 92 times as many new domains were registered across just the six TLDs we have figures for, than were reported and found to be hosting child porn by members of the UK general public in the whole of 2012.

How hard would it be to access child porn if you weren't looking for it specifically? The Ministry of Truth puts your odds at 1 in 2.6 million searches. (MoT points out the odds will fluctuate depending on search terms used, but for the most part, it's not the sort of thing someone unwittingly stumbles upon.)

All those demanding Google do more to block child porn fail to realize there's not much more it can do. The UK already has an underlying blocking system filtering out illegal images at the ISP level, and Google itself runs its own blocker as well.

The above calculations should put the child porn "epidemic" in perspective. As far as the web that Google actively "controls," it's doing about as much as it can to keep child porn and internet users separated. There are millions of pages Google can't or doesn't index and those actively looking for this material will still be able to find it. Google (and most other "internet companies") can't really do more than they're already doing already. But every time a child pornography-related, high profile crime hits the courtroom (either in the UK or the US), the politicians instantly begin pointing fingers at ISPs and search engines, claiming they're not doing "enough" to clean up the internet, something that explicitly isn't in their job description. And yet, they do more in an attempt to satiate the ignorant hunger of opportunistic legislators.

If Google is "the face of the internet" as so many finger pointers claim, than the "internet" it "patrols" is well over 99% free of illegal images, according to a respected watchdog group. But accepting that fact means appearing unwilling to "do something," an unacceptable option for most politicians.